ncapable of these ideals: on the contrary, he has swallowed them
all in his boyhood, and now, having a keen dramatic faculty, is
extremely clever at playing upon them by the arts of the actor and
stage manager. Withal, he is no spoiled child. Poverty, ill-luck, the
shifts of impecunious shabby-gentility, repeated failure as a would-be
author, humiliation as a rebuffed time server, reproof and punishment
as an incompetent and dishonest officer, an escape from dismissal from
the service so narrow that if the emigration of the nobles had not
raised the value of even the most rascally lieutenant to the famine
price of a general he would have been swept contemptuously from the
army: these trials have ground the conceit out of him, and forced him
to be self-sufficient and to understand that to such men as he is the
world will give nothing that he cannot take from it by force. In this
the world is not free from cowardice and folly; for Napoleon, as a
merciless cannonader of political rubbish, is making himself useful.
indeed, it is even now impossible to live in England without sometimes
feeling how much that country lost in not being conquered by him as
well as by Julius Caesar.

However, on this May afternoon in 1796, it is early days with him. He
is only 26, and has but recently become a general, partly by using his
wife to seduce the Directory (then governing France) partly by the
scarcity of officers caused by the emigration as aforesaid; partly by
his faculty of knowing a country, with all its roads, rivers, hills and
valleys, as he knows the palm of his hand; and largely by that new
faith of his in the efficacy of firing cannons at people. His army is,
as to discipline, in a state which has so greatly shocked some modern
writers before whom the following story has been enacted, that they,
impressed with the later glory of "L'Empereur," have altogether refused
to credit it. But Napoleon is not "L'Empereur" yet: he has only just
been dubbed "Le Petit Caporal," and is in the stage of gaining
influence over his men by displays of pluck. He is not in a position to
force his will on them, in orthodox military fashion, by the cat o'
nine tails. The French Revolution, which has escaped suppression solely
through the monarchy's habit of being at least four years in arrear
with its soldiers in the matter of pay, has substituted for that habit,
as far as possible, the habit of not paying at all, except in promises
and patriotic fl